Privacy, does it matter?

Privacy, does it matter?

A brief discussion on modern-day data security and big tech company's biasness on privacy.

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8 min read

In this twenty-first century, we are all surrounded by information, in the regular language we call it data. From waking up in the morning to the night before sleeping we live in this information age. To send our loved ones a cute selfie watch a video on the internet, or buy a beautiful dress from a shopping website, all this happened because of the internet. And to make this happen we give these social sites our personal information like name, mobile number, real-time location ( address ), banking details, pictures, and so on. Have you ever wondered what these private companies do with our data? And is it necessary for them to take it from us? And have you ever thought about why we should give it to them? No, we never thought about it and so no one ever tries to think about these things. We just randomly click what these apps or websites told us to permit our location, contacts, and camera access. You might say the companies must take our information to provide us with their services. If we don't give our contact access to WhatsApp how would we use this messaging app? Yeah, we have to give it to them, but do you know how Whatsapp uses our data?Let's see, Wired, an international magazine company, posted on its blog that WhatsApp shares its user data with the parent company Facebook to improve Facebook's business. Facebook takes users' data like mobile numbers, location, and text messages to use on their platform. Facebook uses the mobile number to recommend new Facebook friends to the user and uses user WhatsApp chats to show them personalized ads on their timelines. So that's what happens to your chats, it's used without even your permission. Let's talk about the actual culprit, Facebook. It is best known for its weak privacy policy, it's more like chips to the CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who always eats users' data. Let me show you how Facebook uses your data to manipulate you without even you knowing about it. In 2016 Facebook was used in the American Presidential Election campaign, a private company named Cambridge Analytica(CA) used 50 lakh Facebook users' data and manipulated them to vote for Donald Trump. According to the International news media channel The New York Times, CA took Facebook users' data and created a psychological profile for every user. And manipulate their Facebook timeline according to their political interest. Facebook then started showing ads that were in favor of Donald Trump, and for some users, they showed posts that were against Hillary Clinton(The opposition leader). And this way Facebook manipulated the 2016 US election. Now just think of it, if it can happen to the US election it can happen to us also. According to an Australian scholar Kate Crawford who works in Microsoft Research and is an AI expert says - “ these tech companies know everything about their users, like how much money their users earn, whether are they rich or poor, where they live, what their interests are. And they sell their data to other companies by which their data has been used to advertise and for other purposes like developing new products so users can spend their time and money on these companies “. For the last two decades, Google has been the major search engine for almost all internet users.It is the primary source of our search query. But not only do we use the search engine of google, but many of us also use google's other products like Gmail, google photos, google drive, google maps, etc. But do you know that the trust we give to google is being betrayed? Just like Facebook, google also uses our personal information for the sake of profit. In 2017 The Wall Street Journal published an article where they revealed that google reads gmail users' mail and based on their data google shows manipulative ads to the users. Based on their interests google shows different users different kinds of ads. And as a result, many google users complained that they bought things that they did not need. Not only google uses our data for ads but also google 24*7 spying on us. The Wired magazine says Google is spying on us not only through their products but from other companies' products. Like google tag manager, which is used by 86% of most visited websites and apps, google is tracking us from the other platforms. That means everywhere you go google follows you through their trackers. So how does Google use our data? Google uses our data to make their products more relevant to us Google shows relevant search results to their search engine based on users' interests and makes youtube suggestions more attractive so we can spend more and more time on youtube. Google also ties up with third-party companies like amazon and Microsoft and sells their user's data to these companies. So these companies can use our data to sell their products even if we don’t have the need. Google also collects your location history by using android mobile’s GPS and improves relevant advertisements according to the user. Google also sells their user's location history to the political leaders and many countries' leading governments so the government and the politicians can know every people's real-time location and they can use the location history for election purposes. In 2018 a news media company named The Intercept came out with news that Google tied up with the Chinese government and helped the government with their data to track the Chinese people. The Chinese government also tracked many protestors who did not like the government and locked them in jail for no real reason. So this way Chinese people were in control of their government. For all of these inappropriate/illegal activities by Google, they have faced many troubles from the government and many legal bodies. In 2018 the CEO of google Sundar Pichai was called in Senet for the complaints of many legal bodies, where Pichai accepted that google collects and misuses users' data. Not only google or Facebook misuses users' personal information but also many other companies violate users' privacy. As an example, Judith Duportail, a journalist asked Tinder for her tinder data, and tinder sent her 800 pages of her data. Where she finds out that tinder knows herself more than she does. She learned that on a normal day, she texted 16 guys, and tinder knew that she was depressed on that particular day.And tinder saved how many guys she swiped right and left, for how many times she stared at a particular picture on tinder. And based on her usability tinder used and shared her data with other third-party companies.So that's how tinder used her data so do the others users. A study made by MIT scholars revealed that fake news spread 7 times faster on Twitter than on any other social platform. And twitter's algorithm helps to spread those types of news. A Twitter developer said they know about the fake news problem but didn't want to change the policy because it makes the platform more attractive. Not only do these tech giants misuse public information but also the small tech companies buy and sell personal information to other companies. As an example, Bobble AI an android mobile keyboard company collects their user's data like, what their users type on the keyboard, what their phrases are in a particular chat, and what the users search on a shopping website, and sell this data to tech giants for the sake of their profit. So this is the story of our tech-savvy world. There is a quote that says, ‘If you don't pay for the product then you are the product ’. And it is so true in this tech-savvy world. Every tech company makes their product for free, so their users can spend more and more time on their platform and so can these tech giants collect more and more information about them.They make manipulative algorithms for making their products more attractive, trying every type of feature so that their users can come again. But these attractive products not only violate privacy but also affect mental psychology. Tech companies make research different marketing approaches, call scientists and researchers for making their platform more efficient, and spend billions of dollars to develop their products so they can make their platform more attractive and make lots of money. For running a business, making money is good, but misusing customers' privacy is not. Never in human history has any company made that much money. You may understand that in the upcoming 2023, there will be 6 trillion dollar companies (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, Facebook ). And in these 6 companies, 5 have a direct connection with personal information. So what's the conclusion ? our personal information is violated. Tech giants know everything about us. So are we just a puppet of these giants, or are we just the money makers of these companies?Edward Tufte said very well, that goes like “ only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software ".We all live in a free world but still, we are in control of hundreds of software engineers' hands.Why we can't be free from these algorithms? Why can't we be free in our thoughts?Why do they manipulate us to whom to vote for, and what to buy? Why can't we decide how much time to spend on these tech products? Why would they manipulate us to spend more time and money on these products?Is it not a direct violation of human rights? How does this world go from being ruled by ruthless kings and dictators to ruthless tech companies?It's because of greed, greed for money.Nowadays greedy people do not want to conquer the world by fight or violation, they want to conquer the world by controlling the human mind. This violation of personal information should be stopped. Because we are not products. Technology should be used to improve our lives, not to worsen our lives. It should be used to make humans more productive and more connected, it should be used to do such things that had never happened in any other ages. All things can happen if we become conscious and make noise about this situation. Tech giants should understand that they have many ways to make money, and violating human rights is not the right one.Hope one day they will understand but if they don't, our world is in the wrong hands.